She, who had formerly spent so many hours on the sofa, never found a moment's time to lie down the whole day; she slept all the more soundly at night as a result. It was quite true what she had heard other women say: a little child claims its mother's whole attention. Oh, how empty, colourless those days had been in which she had only existed. It was only now that there was meaning, warmth, brilliancy in her life.
She walked every day beside the child's perambulator, which the nurse pushed, and it was a special pleasure to her to wheel the light little carriage with its white lacquer, gilt buttons and blue silk curtains herself now and then. How the people stared and turned round when they saw the handsome perambulator--no, the beautiful child. Her heart beat with pleasure, and when her flattered ear caught the cries of admiration, "What a fine child!" "How beautifully dressed!" "What splendid eyes!"--it used to beat even more quickly, and a feeling of blissful pride took possession of her, so that she walked along with head erect and eyes beaming with happiness. Everybody took her to be the mother, of course, the young child's young mother, the beautiful child's beautiful mother. How often strangers had already spoken to her of the likeness: "The exact image of you, Frau Schlieben, only its hair is darker than yours." Then she had smiled every time and blushed deeply. She could not tell the people that it really could not resemble her at all. She hardly remembered herself now that not a drop of her blood flowed in Wölfchen's veins.
It looked at her the first thing when it awoke. Its little bed with its muslin curtains stood near the nurse's, but its first look was for its mother and also its last, for nobody knew how to sing it to sleep as well as she did.
"Sleep sound, sweetest child,
Yonder wind howls wild.
Hearken, how the rain makes sprays
And how neighbour's doggie bays.
Doggie has gripped the man forlorn
Has the beggar's tatter torn----"
sounded softly and soothingly in the nursery evening after evening, and little Wolf fell quietly asleep to the sound of it, to the song of the wind and the rain round defenceless heads, and of beggars whose garments the dog had torn.
Paul Schlieben had no longer any cause to complain of his wife's moods. Everything had changed; her health, too, had become new, as it were, as though a second life had begun. And he himself? He felt much more inclination for work now. Now that he had returned to business he felt a pleasure he had never experienced before when he saw that they were successful in their new ventures. He had never been enterprising before--what was the good? He and his wife had ample for all their requirements. Of course he had always been glad to hear when they had done a good stroke of business, but he could not say it had ever pleased him to make money. He had always found more pleasure in spending it.
His father had been quite different in that respect. He had never been so easy-going, and as long as he lived he had always reproached himself for having let his only son serve as a soldier in a cavalry regiment. Something of a cavalryman's extravagance had clung to him, which did not exactly agree with the views of the very respectable well-to-do merchant of the middle class. And his daughter-in-law? Hm, the old gentleman did not exactly approve of her either in his heart. She had too much modern stuff in her head, and Paul had followed her lead entirely. You could be cultured--why not?--and also take an interest in art without necessarily having so little understanding for the real things of life.
This honest man, this merchant of the old stamp and true son of Berlin, had not had the joy of seeing what his partners now saw with unbounded astonishment. They had no need to shrug their shoulders at the man's lack of interest in the business any longer, and make pointed remarks about the wife who took up his attention so entirely; now he felt the interest they wished him to have. He was pleased to fall in with their plans now. He himself seemed to want, nay, even found it necessary to form new connections, to extend the calm routine of their business right and left, on all sides. He showed a capacity for business and became practical all at once. And in the middle of his calculations, whilst sitting absorbed at his desk, he would catch himself thinking: "that will be of use to the boy in the future." But at times this thought could irritate him so much that he would throw down his pen and jump up angrily from his desk: no, he had only adopted the child to please his wife, he would not love him.
And yet when he came home to dinner on those delightful afternoons, on which he could smell the pines round his house and the pure air still more increased the appetite he had got from his strenuous work, and the boy would toddle up to him patting his little stomach and cry: "Daddy--eat--taste good," and Käte appear at the window, laughing, he could not refrain from swinging the hungry little chatterbox high up into the air, and only put him down on his feet again after he had given him a friendly slap. He was a splendid little chap, and always hungry. Well, he would always have sufficient to eat, thank God.
A certain feeling of contentment would come over the man on those occasions. He felt now what he had never felt before, that one's own home means happiness. And he felt the benefit of having an assured income, that allowed him to enrich his life with all sorts of comforts. The house was pretty. But when he bought it shortly he would certainly add to it, and buy the piece of ground next to it as well. It would be extremely disagreeable if anybody settled down just under their noses.